The Yellow Wallpaper

1) Insanity. Literally. That whole short story EMBODIES what it means to be insane. I remember reading that story my sophomore year of high school, but I DO NOT remember it being THAT...loco....for lack of a better term. I could say 'crazy' cause it means the same thing...but lets be real...everything is more dramatic when you say it in spanish...ANYWAY. The part I found most facinating was at how good the writer was at capturing the processes of the main character. It wasn't about an outsider looking in, she literally dug into the depths of her mind and extracted all of those emotions...all the way to the point of her cracking at the end.

2) In this piece, Gilman lays herself all out, vulnerable for the world to see. In an interview regarding her reasoning for writing this piece, she says that it relates to a point in her life where she was actually put on bed rest for "melencholia". Then when that bed rest attempt caused her to eventually go into a deeper state of dementia, she began writing, and that was what saved her inevitably. So not only does she reveal this deep, twisted, complex mind of this narrator, she shows how the narrator gets there. In the beginning of the piece it is easy for the reader to trust what the narrator is saying because one only assumes that she is sick and on bed rest. Her husband, a physician, doesn't believe she is sick, but she contradicts him and says that it is a nervous depression. He also encourages her to not swell on her condition as to not make it worse. This drives her to dwell more and as the story progresses, and she spends more time in solitude, the reader can see her fall deeper and deeper into her hallucinations. The reader can see her screws coming loose towards the beginning of the story where she interrupts herself with random thoughts, in her journal. Then she starts speaking about "us" going downstairs, instead of just herself. Since she is the only one in the room, there is no reason why she should speak in plural forms. As the story progresses, her condition worses rapidly, and then abruptly ends after she's cracked and her husband finds her. Not only does he find her, but what he finds is so disturbing that it causes him to faint. Over the course of narrative, the reader can see that the speaker has slowly transformed into the lady in the wall paper, and that has driven her to sheer and complete madness.